No Stupid Questions

So… to answer the first question: as I said in a different response recently, questions are just questions. They might be asked out of ignorance, curiosity or malice, but the question itself should never be considered stupid.

As for what lemmy.world is: it’s an online service managed by a small group of people that enables users, and users of other lemmy servers that have an agreement with it, to post information in sub-forums, which can be up and downvoted by the users of the forum community; those votes and their effects can be managed based on the rules of the specific community.

Nostupidquestions@lemmy.world is one community; I’m part of it, even though I’m not a member of lemmy.world, but of lemmy.ca, which is federated with lemmy.world. This means that when I access/post content on lemmy.ca, that gets shared across to the other lemmy servers like yours that hosts or carries the communities I’m involved in.

So… single platform, multiple instances, which have different peering agreements with each other to federate content.

To complicate things further, Lemmy is part of the Fediverse, a larger group of online services that share the same federation structure and much of the same network code, but are designed for different purposes. Lemmy is similar to Reddit, Mastodon is similar to Twitter (ability to broadcast short messages that go into subscriber’s feeds and get aggregated), there’s one specifically for sharing video with others, etc.

This only tangentially answers your questions, but I felt like it was a good idea to get the foundation concepts out of the way first, after which others can reply to the particular bullet points.

"Perchance" is one of the most confusing platform names I've come across in a while. A really terrible choice.

Others have summarised lemmy, lemmy.world and its use quite well already, so i just looked for the connection to perchance:

I checked perchance.org and they mention that they have a community on lemmy where one can ask for help or share creations. (Similar to the "No Stupid Questions" community you posted this to)

They specifically link to this community: !perchance@lemmy.world (https://lemmy.world/c/perchance)

So no real relationship other than that they use Lemmy as a platform for their users to exchange on and use lemmy.world as a "provider" for their community space (or "forum" in older words)

• Is it like anything else I might be familiar with to help me understand better? (Note: almost 70 so may need old references.)

Reddit was mentioned, but that explains the format of this site, that people post stuff and people can upvote stuff they like to make it more visible to others.

But I haven't (so far) seen anyone mention something similar to answer the question as to why there are so many different sites here. People from lemmy.world, lemmy.ca, lemmy.nz, and others are all participating here, all on their own sites but all somehow connected.

The old (and still well used) equivalent here is email. Email is a federated service, it's not hosted by one company, anyone can operate an email server and in fact it's very common. Emails look perhaps like dave@gmail.com or dave@company.com or dave@something.com. the part after the @ tells your email provider how to reach the server of the person you are emailing. You'll notice user names can look similar to an email address, but have an @ at the beginning to identify them as separate from email addresses.

But yes, as others have mentioned, lemmy.world is the largest lemmy website, run by some people called the Fedihosting Foundation. Anyone can sign up there, and anyone can create a community there. It seems very unlikely there is an official relationship between Lemmy.world and Perchance.

lemmy.world -> An instance of "Lemmy": it's like if Reddit could be hosted by anyone in the world rather that one big server, and all these mini-servers can talk to each other! Also, Lemmy is part of the greater "Fediverse" (kind of like if Instagram users could see posts from Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube. The Fediverse is a collection of different platforms like Mastodon, Lemmy, Pixelfed, Frendica, PeerTube, etc.). lemmy.world in particular is one of the larger instances of Lemmy.

lemmy.world is used like Reddit, you can create posts in "communities" (subreddit equivalent) and comment on them. There are thousands of communities on all sorts of topics (discussion, sciences, movies, games, asking questions, various hobbies, etc.)! You are also able to upvote and downvote (but there's no "algorithm" like on something like Reddit). That's the main gist of it, I think.

Perchance, after a quick search, is an AI image generator, so I don't think it has much of a connection with any of Lemmy's instances. I will say that competitions usually give you extra entries if you subscribe to their social media and such on the various platforms, so that's probably why you had to make an account on lemmy.